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For men only

Ladies, are you still reading? You shouldn't be. Go away. Stop reading, please. Now. I mean it. This post is about something you can't possibly relate to--or at least I hope you can't! It's all about something unique to being a man. Something you couldn't possibly understand.

This is a post about beards.

Ok, so maybe it's not really about beards. But last night's household drama of the plastic guard on my electric trimmer breaking--so that I now have a bald patch on my chin--got me thinking about gender and parenting. When I arrived home from an emergency trip to the personal grooming aisle at Target, I presented my choice to Kelly only to get a blank stare. Now, I probably stood in that aisle for a good 20 minutes trying to select the best value and performance for the money. I examined the samples for craftsmanship and quality materials. I was quite proud.

Try to imagine it's yarn, I told her. Because really, she just didn't care. And that's fine. You're a woman. I'm a man.

But it got me thinking about raising boys and raising girls. Especially in the swirl lately of different takes on gender and parenting. Which is harder. Which is scarier. Kelly had just finished mocking a Role Reboot piece from a father who said his worst nightmare was raising a son who would go on to victimize women. Ok, not the conclusion I would reach either. But a fascinating topic--what it means to raise boys and girls in today's culture.

My kids are little so it's hard for me to give much credit to boys versus girls at the moment. Whether they are difficult or easy has less to do with gender and more to do with personality. Or, perhaps, it mostly reflects that Kelly and I are choosing to raise our kids to be whoever they will be. They set the tone. Which, I think, has made the last 2 years of parenting for us fairly easy. Maybe no walk in the park, but we have great kids and we don't swim upstream. Not trying to rub it in, I promise. Just saying that the days where I think my kids are joy far outnumber the days where I think about how hard raising children is. I know it isn't that way for everyone.

In any case, people often reflect that boys are harder to raise at this age than girls. I dispute this. Cole likes to pickup rocks, dig in the dirt, and tackle people rather than hug. If this makes him "difficult" in the eyes of some, so be it. We just chalk it up to being a little boy. We find it cute. Now, whether I find the drama of a teen girl slamming the door to her room in a tad over a decade, we'll see who ends up harder to manage. Who knows, maybe Cole will end up a dark, brooding Poe-esque young man while Leda coasts through life without a care in the world. Only time will tell.

The point is that there are very few places left in society where being a man or being a woman makes a difference. The restroom comes to mind. Though family and unisex bathrooms are on the rise. We recently had a pretty heated discussion about opposite sex children in a locker room.

And then there's beard trimming.

From my point of view, the biggest problem with raising the genders is that we've made great strides in making an even playing field for women while boys still face higher gender expectations. Some of that is our own fault, men.

In the car on the way home from the store, the story on NPR was--ironically--about "tomboy fashion" and how women's clothes have taken a lesson from men's fashion. Men's clothing has most decidedly not taken cues from women's fashion. Why is for another blog. But it speaks to the way we've egalitarianized...is that a word?...the process of being a female. Options are wide open we tell our daughters.

Maybe being "worried" about my son is too much of a stretch. More like I want to make sure he has and feels he has the same wide open options that his sister faces. Do what you like. Be you. Respect yourself.

Or, perhaps, the better question is whether men feel similarly pulled towards diversifying the male experience. Judging by the at home dad community, I would say yes. Certainly when it comes to parenting. But the question is whether men will make the push into teaching preschool, being a NICU nurse, or the like.

I'm not sure the answer to all this is in deciding which gender is easier or harder to parent and is instead found in paying more attention to our children as individuals and raising them accordingly. Because, to me, the actually interesting part about gender and parenting is that who your kids turn out to be has a lot less to do with their biology. I'm learning daily that it has a lot more to do with what's going on between the ears--yours and your kid's--than what's going on in their chromosomes.